Death wish

Meanwhile, in Queensland, Labor is marching towards a defeat that has been inevitable ever since Bligh’s post-election announcement, in 2009, of a massive, and economically unjustified program, of asset sales. Despite the fact that most of them are going to lose their seats, and that the policies violates both election commitments and Labor policy, hardly a single member of the Labor Caucus has opposed this, or even dissented from the retribution dealt out to the ETU and others who did stand up.

@Sam I despair! I really do. Sam if you cannot see the connection between axing programs and smoothing the paths of old mates then you, like them, are probably unable to organise a root in a brothel. This all stems from the belief that the country can be run by staring into a computer and that you can do anything you like so long as someone, somewhere, in a focus group says it’s ok or, what’s more likely, some consultant somewhere says it is ok.

@Sam Firstly no self deprecation (even pretended) please. Secondly Carr did more harm than most of the preceding Tories put together. How would you like to be reliant on public transport in Sydney? What long term policies with even a greenish tinge did he implement? All we have is a history of compliance with big business and his right wing mates. When he left, having come to the position to do good and done very well indeed, there was a procession of no-hoper’s who handed the job to the Libs . We see today they are even considering Kennealy who was even worse. Just to set things straight it is NOT the personality its the policy and the implementation.

The NSW ALP needs to appoint someone of the calibre of Doug Cameron and George Campbell. This is needed at this point in time to at least indicate an aspiration to return the Labor project to its real base – unions and to refocus politics on the broad mass of ‘workers without degrees’ in general.

The shift of ALP base wrought since the 1980’s has destroyed the ALP as a distinguishable, active, progressive force in politics. Its just the playground of cartoon characters as far as I can see.

1. Why are you so quick to believe the “stories” eminating from the Tory press about Gillard? Surely their track rcord warrents a certain degree of scepticism? Btw, do you think they would resist lying about Rudd – supposing he had won – as they went about trying to install Abbott as PM?

I don’t care about “the Carr thing” either, and for much the same reasons as both of you!

The solar hot water thing is one of those mystical “up yours” we get from time to time. It isn’t too hard to work out which ideologues/sectors would be behind that type of genius.

I was recently reminded of a piece I researched and wrote back in 2007.

It was after the announcement of the “$100million Brisbane Green Heart City Smart” thing.

“According to ‘Origin’ energy’s website, you can get a solar hot water system fully installed for about $2,000. So you could also spend that $100,000,000 to buy 50,000 solar hot water systems fully-installed on Brisbane rooftops. That would save those households a combined total of about $15,000,000 every year in electricity bills and cut greenhouse emissions by about 150,000 tonnes every year! So your $100,000,000 would save 50,000 lucky homes $150,000,000 over ten years AND reduce emissions by 1.5 million tonnes. Why wouldn’t everyone embrace such practical investment? Unless of course you were in the business of selling coal-fired electricity…. oh, I see.”

It doesn’t have links, but the electricity info came from the “Origin” site and, from memory, I may have got the GHG figures elsewhere.

It was all ‘back-of-envelope’ and obviously a serious effort to do solar would involve vast improvements in the figures with scaling (those were retail figures but imagine if a government actually bought in bulk!).

Megan, I don’t have any particular gripe with Bob Carr, he is a reasonable person and progressive thinker and in general left NSW in a good state. It is just that there is the perception that he is part of the NSW right from which the instability emanates (supposedly).

Re solar hot water. There are some reasons to not be extremely concerned:

1. SHW is still subsidised by RECs
2. SHW isn’t that uneconomic – it shouldn’t need to be so heavily subsidised.
3. a 5-star gas instantaneous hot water system is about the same emissions as an electric-boosted solar hot water system, and gas-boosted solar is quite expensive, so maybe 5-star gas is best bang for buck anyway (though solar-electric boosted + Green Power is probably pretty good)
4. Calculations on the greenhouse savings of SHW presume fairly ideal conditions. I’m yet to see a thorough report of greenhouse savings of SHW in the field, with non-ideal orientations, less-than-clean panels, and less than optimum hot water usage patterns (use most of your hot water in the evening, and the electric boost might be chugging along all night)

I think it is bad policy to abruptly end a subsidy program rather than tapering it down, to avoid pain for the industry, so that is a problem, and something the govt could have avoided doing. That is the main cause for concern I think. It won’t be the first subsidy program (whether green or otherwise) to be abruptly removed. Not offering that as an excuse, just an observation.

I agree that the two matters are troubling. Not because Carr should or shouldn’t be considered but because it quickly became public and has been used to undermine Gillard. It is quite reasonable to consider a range of people and Carr is a candidate worthy of consideration.
The solar hot water announcement should have been made as part of the budget announcements in May. It is certainly a bad look to end it in such a pre-emptive fashion. It appears that Federal Labor has learned nothing from last week and this will not help Queensland Labor in the election this month.

dear editor
i’m inclined to see bob carr as part of the problematic paradigm that got us here & gillard going for him as more of the same. i’d go the likes of carmel tebbutt or nathan rees as senator for nsw. unless they’re too desperately needed in their own state party to be spared for the national forum.
yours sincerely
alfred vension

Perhaps we could get Paul Howes into parliament by the Senate vacancy? It would be a great message to send that the right had agreed to compromise and were committed to getting the best and brightest into the Right places.

We had solar hot water in Brisbane and only had to run the booster 4-5 times a year for an hour or two (maximum) on very cold riany winter mornings to get enough hot (well, warm) water for a shower (admittedly that was during the drought). The cost savings from memory were not huge compared to off peak electric hot water but it did function very well with zero maintenance of the panels

Kevin Rudd as foreign minister?
why is this impossible?
i know, i know the prevailing veneer of personal feelings uber alles says “never-in-hell”

then again personal feelings seem to be the weapon of choice in the continuing assault on the process of functioning govt.
revving up outrage to drown out the reality of parliament,seemingly the only tactic of
an opposition and media refusing to participate except as petulant sore losers does the constituency no favours.
the leadership challenge was normal politics.
a return by the previous foreign minister to the post would be a display of statesmanship to confound anything an opposing ideology could throw at it and display committment to the conviction that the position requires the best person available to fill it.
and for my money Kevin Rudd should be foreign minister(i don’t want the job,i couldn’t do it anyway)
so there you go.

we all know you don’t have to like some one to work together,especially if you don’t have to see each other all that often.

Whatever Gillard’s weaknesses (not least the fact that many voters have simply stopped listening to her) Rudd would not have been a wise choice last Monday. As a minimum you need a leader who has the respect of the bulk of their colleagues. And Rudd is widely loathed – for good and bad reasons. (To know him is to hate him, as one member of the caucus put it.)

The next step is to let Gillard have 6 months or so to see if the polls can be changed. If they can’t, then I suspect Bill Shorten will be Prime Minister by the end of the year.

On privatisation, the lack of opposition reflects, in part, the ideological denuding of the ALP as part of the broader technocratic redefinition of politics and policy-making that has taken place since the 1980s. (As Mitterand once said, ‘after me there will be only accountants.’) The remains of the left within the party and the unions need to get their act together and start activley and loudly opposing such measures from the standpoint of offering a non-neoliberal model of Australia’s economic future (Australia Reconstructed part two?).

The ALP does stand for something: a liberal statist vision of national capitalist development rooted in a naturalistic conception of social harmony.

As a socialist this is not a vision I share.

The difference between the ALP and the Libs is not as great as many would like. They are both pro-capitalist and view capitalist society as essentially conducive to social harmony -given the right policy settings (more or less state intervention of varying forms).

The vagueness of the ALP’s message on many issues reflects the imperatives of modern electioneering – the need to appeal to very diverse groups of voters to win elections in a context where most voters do not engage with the detail of policy.

And yet if Rudd had been elected I somehow doubt he would have managed to mess up the choice of foreign minister and NSW senator quite so spectacularly. No doubt we will hear soon that this own goal is somehow Rudd’s fault.

@sam

The plain paper packaging legislation is good. But if your best case is legislation opposed only by the tobacco lobby and the IPA, and where Labor and the Coalition have pretty much the same record and goals, then you kind of prove my point.

nobody cares about the Carr thing. except every newspaper and television “news” establishment. ABC24 has 24 hours of material to fill on an inadequate budget. Journalism is sitting around watching a twitter feed. we need to watch talking heads on The Drum chuckle about the fact that the media isn’t covering policy in the few seconds that they aren’t speculating about the latest hot canberra goss. leadership scuffle over, they suffer immediate withdrawal symptoms, and like a junkie start snorting down the first trivial nonevent they can find.

Labor is simply a coalition of nakedly self-interested amoral asperational a-holes who feign greater concern for “social justice” simply because that might gain them some votes. A familiar ruse of con-artist.s

The ministry reshuffle demonstrates that Labor is in utter chaos. McClelland is now thinking about resigning from parliament, while Stephen Smith must be right royally pissed off. Presumably he is being punished for declining to put the boot into Rudd last week. What a vote of no confidence in the current bunch of MPs, that nobody is deemed capable of filling the role of Foreign Minister and they have to implore a retired state premier with zero relevant experience to fill the void. Oh wait, he does a great Abraham Lincoln impersonation so the yanks will love him … what other qualifications could he possibly need?

And of course the whole Carr episode has featured more serial lying from all involved, demonstrating yet again that deceit and lies are all they know how to do. If the independents keep declaring confidence in this government they are demonstrating their own complete lack of either principle or judgement.

As for Swan: when he proposes some serious tax reforms especially of capital gains and inheritance taxes, we will know his concerns about the super-rich are sincere. Until then, it’s all part of the endless performance art that constitutes the contemporary ALP’s conception of government.

Anyway, Gillard has neutered Rudd and thrown sand in the eyes of the opposition, as evidenced by the somewhat nasty comments by Abbott on the Carr appointment. So I don’t think the opposition ( ie the Abbott camp) are too happy.

“By importing to Canberra the original architect of the NSW disease she is proving that the spin, deception, the do-nothing mindset of NSW Labor is now rampant in Canberra and is now ruling the show.”

“He was the one that gave us Eddie Obeid, Joe Tripodi and Mark Arbib and now he is the foreign minister in Canberra,” Mr Abbott said.

People would tremble at the prospect of Mr Carr becoming the next Labor leader, he said.

“The people of NSW, particularly the people of western Sydney would tremble at the prospect of Bob doing to our country what he did to our state.

“He was a do-nothing premier for a decade and the last thing we need now in Australia is a do-nothing prime minister or worse a do-damage prime minister.”

Mr Abbott said despite having 103 members in the Labor caucus, Ms Gillard had to bring in an outsider to fill the role of foreign minister.

“Julia Gillard asked herself, who of all my colleagues is fit to be foreign minister, and she said none,” he said.

“It’s no wonder that Simon Crean is furious, that Stephen Smith is furious, and every single one of her colleagues is furious that none of them were good enough to be the foreign minister of Australia.”

Mr Abbott said Ms Gillard had lied to the Australian people again.

“This prime minister said time and time again that the reports that she had offered the foreign ministry to Bob Carr were completely untrue,” he said.

The crazy thing about it is that this (despite what we might think of Carr) would have been a win if Gillard had managed not to give misleading answers about it. She didn’t need to give those answers. She could have got away with a no comment.

I don’t think Carr was a great premier by any means but I suspect he is lot more popular in NSW than Abbot would like to think.

I think Carr is a horrible choice — but on the positive side, she has left the Murdochracy and Abbott with egg on their faces after they’ve accused her of lying. Now it’s clear that they were in cahoots, simply making stuff up to suit their meme.

Given that I regard Gillard as a repulsive conservative and her cabinet as a group of almost completely unremarkable hacks, adding Carr makes little difference. OTOH, giving the finger to the media is something from which I can draw some modest amusement. I’d like to think she’d baited them to go her on these grounds by getting one of her team to “leak” what some patsy thought was something juicy. Doubtful, but a nice thought.

John, hopefully is episode will demonstrate the folly of believing anything written in the Australian.

I mean, didn’t you find it just a little too convenient that the Australian managed to land a story that played exactly to the negative stereotypes of Gillard the day after she thumped Rudd? What are the odds?

They went looking for this story and when they couldn’t find anything, they made it up. They would have done the same to Rudd.

Their goal is to install Abbott. I don’t see why we should be helping them.

I am afraid I read it quite differently. A lot of the things Gillard has done since last Monday’s caucus strike me as ‘because I can’. Sacking McLelland is a folly that could actually destroy her government and certainly destroys any prospect of unifying the party. We’ll know if we see even more silliness masquerading as clever politics over the next few weeks.

“John, hopefully is episode will demonstrate the folly of believing anything written in the Australian.”

Say, what? Regrettably, it’s now clear that the original report that Gillard had approached Carr was true and that her emphatic denial rested on weasel words about whether the approach included a formal offer.

She’s managed to pull a sort-of win out of this, but her credibility has declined even further. And if McClelland quits, the whole show could go.

It is up to the media to investigate and report. Gillard was asked a question and gave an answer that is true only if you really, really like parsing. The crazy thing is she could legitimately have refused to answer.

I agree Carr will make a good foreign minster, even with his record as premier, I am uncertain that it is necessarily after the election that he find himself leader.

Appointing Bob Carr to be a senator and be the FM, shows that the will of the members of the ALP and the Caucus have become seemingly irrelevant. This may be a Constitutional process, but it is not a democratic one. Still, I suppose if I had to chose between Bob Carr and Mark Arbib, I would probably go for Bob Carr. It was very noble of Bob Carr to give up his sojourn in private finance to return to the travails of public service. He seems to have won the approval of the media, and I suppose that is all that matters.

There are no proportional representation chambers except the Irish Dail that have direct by-elections. This is because you are giving some of the electorate, those whose senators remain in place, an extra vote electing the new senator. To say that is an undemocratic process is to argue against proportional representation itself. The way the ALP picks senate candidates is a different story like most of the ALP’s deeply undemocratic structure.

Headline from the original report: “Mutiny kills PM’s Bob Carr plan”. This is 100% false, no wriggle room allowed. The Australian, in an attempt to make news – not report it – lied to us. Hence the folly in ever believing what that rag writes, especially when it so neatly lines up with existing predudices.

Gillard’s denial: what is more likely, that in the middle of delicate negotiations that would have included at least 4 possible FM candidates Gillard sounds out the candidates but makes no offers until friday or, Gillard offers the role to Carr, takes it back after a hiding from Smith, then decides to offer it Carr again?

The latter seems unlikely, given Gillard’s obvious negotiation skills. The former is basically what she said happened. In the absence of counter evidence, I believe her. YMMV.

McClelland: no bearing on my original point, but I am inclined to agree with you: unnecessary.

Bob Carr’s appointment to the States House, as an ex-premier, is an obvious improvement on his elected predecessor and some other colleagues. One notices that the ALP members play little role in either proposing or deposing their party representatives. These matters are driven by political pragmatism, the same principle that led to adoption of PR for Senate elections.

Pr was indeed adopted for pragmatic reasons but it transformed the senate, which had been a joke where one party sometimes held every seat under the block preferential system, into an actual legislative body.

I continue to await evidence that Gillard has produced any policy initiative that has not subsequently been scrapped.

Reluctantly I have to concede that Pr Q was right about Gillard’s policy-free zone. But thats beceuse Rudd was a ministerial-free zone.

Gillard has not initiated and then implemented any major policies in her first term. She has made promising noises about:

federalising hospital service delivery

means testing state aid to private schools

introducing a universal dentalcare scheme

implementing a national disability scheme

Unfortunately none of these policy ideas have gone through the formality of actually being passed into law, getting funding, still less actually delivering services.

Rudd and Gillard would together make one good politician: Rudd the policy ideas man and Gillard the ministerial administratrix. Indeed IIRC the original spin on their leadership was to sell them as a two-person ministerial duo. Maybe they should have stuck with that.

Gillard is essentially Rudd’s competent alter-ego. The problem with Rudd was that he delivered on his bad policies (“Big Australia”, ending the “Pacific Solution”) but squibbed on his good policies (CPRS and MRRT). Gillard’s main policy focus has been shelving Rudd’s bad policies and implementing Rudd’s good policies.

But all Gillard’s policy work, which is, admittedly concerned with concluding the ALP’s first term agenda, has been operating under two massive constraints:

fiscal constraint: keep the budget in surplus.

political constraint: save ALP marginal seats in Sydney

These two constraints have amplified her policy conservatism. Frankly I am happy that she has not tried to bite off more than the ALP can chew. It is still fighting gamely to get the CPRS and MRRT bedded down, that may all come to naught if Abbott gets in.

More generally Gillard’s policy conservatism reflects the broad reform fatigue that still ails the AUS populus. Currently they can stomach about one big reform a decade and then coast for the next ten years off the next boom in property, minerals or what have you.

It would be unkind to point out that federalising hospital service delivery, introducing a universal dental care scheme, and the NDIS were all Rudd ideas. However Gillard is not entirely a policy free zone. There was, for instance, Medicare Gold.

Gillard is not entirely a policy free zone. There was, for instance, Medicare Gold.

If the GREENs assylum-seeker policy had not been the perfect embodiment Idiot Leftism they would have done the right thing and supported Gillard’s Malaysian Solution, a humane version of the Pacific Solution. But they didn’t.

So Gillard’s best example of policy initiative has now settled, along with numberless boat people, at the bottom of Davy Jones locker.

I am not entirely sure that a charge of Idiot Leftism is quite enough to dismiss the human rights issues in Malaysia or the simple fact that the ‘solution’ may work for a couple of months, but when the 800 Malaysia slots are filled the effectiveness of the policy is at an end.

I am happy enough to called an Idiot Leftist, although I do look forward to actually seeing an argument that goes beyond name-calling. I would hope we are not going to hear an argument that authoritarianism, religious discrimination, locking up opposition leaders, rigging elections, sodomy prosecutions and caning are humane.

I can’t forgive fascist or rightist ideological nut bags from the Tories or the Labor right on privatisation, but if Anna Bligh, who knew better and understood the outright treachary involved in the breaking of the explicit, core, “no privatisation” promise- further damaging already damaged trust in government, FB – is chucked and even ends up somehow injured, I’ll just yawn, probably in satisfaction.
I have no time for Judases, particularly when they perpetrate on the scale perpetrated here.